As for the Qaraʾites, most of them eventually embraced Islam. Their clinging to the outward sense of the texts and their refusal to tamper with that sense proved beneficial, so that only a small remnant of them is left. They were readier to accept Islam for two reasons:

First, their mistrust of the jurists who fabricated lies about God and their open denunciation of those jurists.

Second, their commitment to the literal wording, without distorting it or nullifying its meaning.

By contrast, the Rabbanites have been hemmed in by their jurists and hakhamim (1), who have squeezed them into a space no wider than the eye of a needle by imposing on them a host of additional strictures, burdens and shackles (2) piled on top of the burdens and shackles God Himself had legislated for them as a punishment. The jurists had several objectives in doing this:

One objective was to intensify their opposition (3) to the creeds of other nations, lest mixing with them lead to conformity and to abandoning the Sabbath and Judaism.

A second objective is that the Jews are scattered (4) across the earth—east, west, south and north—as the Exalted One says: “We dispersed them on the earth as separate communities” (Qur’an 7:168). Whenever a group of them resides in a town and a man of their faith arrives there